REVIEW: Summer Holiday, Translations and The Chalk Garden

WELCOME back to the original busman’s holiday! The 1963 Cliff Richard film, Summer Holiday, in which four young mechanics drive a converted double-decker to the Continent, has been relocated from Aldenham to Bolton in a site-specific show that takes us on a joyous journey, not just on stage but before we even reach the theatre.

Directors Elizabeth Newman and Ben Occhipinti start the show off-site at Bolton bus station, where the four friends plan the trip, then transport the audience in a fleet of buses to the town’s Victoria Square (standing in for Northern France).

Here we disembark while the boys pick up a stranded singing trio, do a brief dance on the town hall steps and escort us to the nearby theatre for the rest of the show.

The fatuous plot is merely an excuse for some classic 1960s numbers (Bachelor Boy, The Next Time, even an interpolated The Young Ones), with which the audience joins in, and exuberant comedy routines from Barbara Hockaday.

The acting, like the set, is painted in bold brushstrokes, with the cast, many talented instrumentalists, giving their all in the musical numbers.

In the lead role Michael Peavoy is charming, charismatic and a better actor than Sir Cliff.

It’s a relief to be able to give a loud hurrah to a production at the National Theatre, whose recent main-stage work has been lamentable.

This is in part because Brian Friel’s Translations is one of the finest plays of the past 40 years but also because, in Ian Rickson, it has found a director who, unlike artistic director Rufus Norris, shows respect for the text.

Translations is a rich and resonant play, in which the British mapping of Ireland and anglicisation of Gaelic place names in the mid 19th century becomes a metaphor for a wider cultural appropriation.

Friel demonstrates both how we are defined by language and how we can surmount its limitations, as when a British soldier and an Irish girl (beautifully played by Adetomiwa Edun and Judith Roddy) fall in love despite the lack of a common tongue.